In 'No Turning Back,' The 'Epic' Journeys Of Four Syrians In WartimeJournalist Rania Abouzeid has had a front-row view of the Syrian conflict since its beginning. Her new book tracks people through the six chaotic years following the first peaceful protests.

The civil war in Syria is, by any measure, one of the world's great catastrophes. And for much of the time, it has raged too dangerous for most journalists to get close to those at the center of the conflict. One who has is Rania Abouzeid, who was there at the start.

RANIA ABOUZEID: I witnessed what was one of the first demonstrations in Damascus in late February 2011. And I was trying to figure out what it all meant and what was happening.

MONTAGNE: Abouzeid's new book "No Turning Back" traces the stories of individual Syrians from those small protests through the bloody civil war that the protests became. We began our conversation by talking about the early days known as the Arab Spring. Syria's President Bashar al-Assad was presenting himself as a modern leader. But many Syrians were haunted by what his father had done as president in 1982, mercilessly crushing a rebellion in the city of Hama.

ABOUZEID: The regime went house to house in Hama. And nobody knows how many people were killed. Estimates are in the tens of thousands. People put up mass graves that were then paved over. And Hama lived on as a potent example of the price of dissent and what the Assads could do.

MONTAGNE: Could do and would do.

ABOUZEID: Yes. Syrians knew what to expect. And they knew their regime well. They knew that this was not going to be easy.

MONTAGNE: Well, that's where you, in a sense, found one of the profiles that you do in the book. It was a protester by the name of Suleiman.

ABOUZEID: Yes.

MONTAGNE: Give us a small portrait of exactly who he was.

ABOUZEID: Suleiman was a man with everything, really - a rich man. He was a manager. His family had money. He was a man with opportunities, yet he...

MONTAGNE: A young man - a young man.

ABOUZEID: A very young man - he was a young man in his 20s. But he knew that he was privileged and that most Syrians didn't have the opportunities that he had. And for him, that was enough for him to take to the streets.

MONTAGNE: And then there's Mohammad, a suspected Islamist, who would have been the enemy of Assad's regime and had felt the lash of that regime - a different sort of a potential protester or rebel.

ABOUZEID: No, absolutely. He's Suleiman's opposite. Suleiman was a peaceful protester. He never picked up a gun, whereas Mohammad was, if you like, baptized in the aftermath of what happened in Hama in '82. So he grew up seeing his male relatives hunted and humiliated by the regime. And with time, he became radicalized. And his form of radicalization was Islamic radicalization.

MONTAGNE: And part of that radicalization process was his - he cycled in and out of prison.

ABOUZEID: Yes.

MONTAGNE: Read us just - from the book, read us just a little bit of what being in Assad's prison could mean to somebody like Mohammad.

ABOUZEID: Sure. (Reading) For the first 25 days, he was subjected to procedures common in Syrian jails. Doused with water and electrocuted, hung from the ceiling by his wrists, his toes barely touching the floor as guards beat his sides. They call this shaba (ph) - whipped on the soles of his feet with cables until he couldn't walk - the falaka (ph) torture method. Then they ignored him. He said that was worse. Alone in the dark, he hallucinated, becoming convinced that his baby daughter was in there with him. He'd bang on the door and ask for a beating, quote, "just to feel something."

MONTAGNE: Fast forward in a way. There came a time when there were refugees. And you profile a little girl. Tell us about her and her siblings.

ABOUZEID: I tell the story of Ruha. I focused on Ruha because she was a little girl. But she was much older than a little girl in her ability to explain and try and understand the things that were happening around her and expressed it in her own ways, whether that meant that she would be making paper planes when she was hiding in her house's basement from the real planes that were above them or collecting shrapnel because she thought that they were pretty shapes. And they considered them like a new form of toys. So I followed Ruha and her family for six years.

MONTAGNE: All three of these, six years later, were different people than they might have expected to be.

ABOUZEID: Yes, all of them. Every person in the book has changed. I mean, their journeys really were epic. And that's the only word that comes to mind when I think about what happened to them. And the thing is that they are not unusual. This was one of my big problems when I sat down to write the book - was I didn't know whose stories to tell because they were all epic. I knew so many people who had been through things that most of us can't even imagine.

MONTAGNE: When you talk about people being very different at the six-year mark of this long and still continuing war, what kind of ways do people change?

ABOUZEID: Some of them have literally survived what I think hell is. And yet they emerged on the other side without bitterness or regret. Some of them lost so much. And yet they can still joke and laugh and love life. They still have hope. They still have plans. They still have dreams. I have a friend of mine whose factory was bombed recently. And I spoke to him this morning before I came in to the interview. And he said, it's OK. We'll rebuild. I'm making plans to rebuild. But until I do that, I'm looking to see if there's an empty factory somewhere where I can rent - that I can rent until I get my factory up and running again. I mean, there is a resilience that continues to astound me.

MONTAGNE: Rania Abouzeid - her new book is "No Turning Back: Life, Loss, And Hope In Wartime Syria." Thank you so much for joining us.

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